What is the importance of committing mistakes?

It is a well-known fact that all human beings are different and unique in their ways. However, no matter how unique and different we are from one another, one thing which remains the same between all of us is our innate nature to commit mistakes.

What differs, is how we overcome our mistakes and learn from them.

So I want to provide an insight into how important or crucial it is for any human to commit mistakes but what is more important is how we overcome these mistakes or errors in judgment.

Committing mistakes is normal

If you started working or just launched a new project or set up a new project plan, perhaps, in the beginning, you will feel restless, doubting or even spending sleepless nights over it.

This way to accomplishment or success seems wrong, and you need to slow down.

Don't stress about it. While it is normal to feel a bit anxious, but do not let anxiety make you feel depressed, disappointed and lost. Understand that it is normal to make mistakes.

All successful and influential people of today and the past also had at some point in time committed mistakes from which they learned many things. Remember, that you are no longer alone sailing in the same boat.

As Albert Einstein once said, "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." You will grow only when you commit mistakes and learn from them.

Transform mistakes into useful learning

What is important is how you get over the mistakes after making them.

You can either sit sobbing over it and questioning to how you could have committed such a mistake and why all this had to happen to you, or you can just accept that it was a mistake and take the whole thing as an experience which taught you so many things and move on the next level.

The choice is ultimately yours.

Acceptance is the key

Many of you must have heard people saying that accepting or acknowledging our mistakes makes a bigger and better human being of us.

The person we are today is because we kept learning from our mistakes and eventually grew better in the things which we did. If we had kept our ego and refused to accept the fact that we could commit any mistake, it would have stunted our growth as professionals.

We must always swallow our pride and ego and build the courage and strength which are required to accept our mistake and learn from them. Only after doing this, will we be able to grow and evolve as professionals.

It can be quite tricky, but if you can laugh at the mistakes which you committed instead of resisting, arguing and questioning as to how you could have done such a thing, you will be a winner all the way.

Take responsibility and move on

A developing person accepts their mistake, takes responsibility for the failure and moves on. And this person will not only be growing faster, but also people around will start respecting them more.

The bottom line is that as humans everyone will and is supposed to commit mistakes. However, what is important is the way we keep aside our ego and accept our mistakes and move on in life.

Here is the question for YOU:What was your top mistake that you’ve learned the most from?—share in the comments below!

Originally published on ilonacodes.comPhoto by Raj Eiamworakul on Unsplash

I make mistakes on a daily basis. Sometimes they are simple and easy to fix, like a typo or some minor change that breaks one integration test I haven't even knew about. But I like to find these and fix them before they go to our repository. Not because I don't want to "lose my face" or come as a plain idiot, but because this can pollute my colleagues work. If the error is small enough, it can sneak to the master branch and spread (for example, some will build upon that, thinking that this is fully functional piece of code – picked from master, all after all).

The most important thing on making mistakes it not to be ashamed of it.

And to answer your question, I once merged a very early-stage version migration (from v1 to v2) to master. And, since we got a CI/CD, it went to prod immediately. We were fixing this (mostly my colleagues, as this was 95% backend stuff) until 1 or 2 after midnight.

I didn't get the impression she was talking about git commits although that's what I jump to as well when I see the word "commit". I suppose that's why we have git to avoid the chaos associated with collaboration and human error.

What's really fun is when you commit your environment variables to github. Or accidently delete part of a database "DELETE FROM inventory". Mistakes are part of the game but we can mitigate it in different ways.

I guess, these situations are usual for beginners in IT and it's okay and not the end of the world: env variables can be "gitignored" or removed from the repo, and for a database, devs should always have backups 🙂

I've definitely done both of these things, fortunately not with anything major. 😁 The frustrating part of committing env files is that they'll remain in the commit logs even if they're ignored later still allowing potential access through the projects history. It's like cleaning up an oil spill. 😳 Lessons learned I suppose.

I actually would advocate that it's good to make mistake on other people's codebases.

I mean: I've made lots of mistakes in my own personal projects, and had lots of bugs that I learned from.

But the mistakes where I truly learned a lot are the ones where I was working on a company's codebase on critical code and then I badly broke it.

I've had some bad moments where I broke important things that probably cost the company money. But after the momentary stress, (and especially in retrospect now that I no longer work for them) those mistakes turned out to be pretty insignificant in my overall career.

And those mistakes taught me the most.

So don't worry so much about breaking code, even if it's your employer's codebase. The more critical and important the code, the bigger the opportunity to break it and learn something!

My one of many mistakes i done, i ran a update script which had missing statement of "where" in sql, and it updated whole 1k records of live orders we had in 2,3 months.
Thankfully i got little old backup and data we had store in separate table, i fixed it with a script again but there i learnt that i should never run such scripts direct on live mode.